Does Convergence Impact Uptime?

One of the biggest trends in data center infrastructure is convergence. Actually it has been happening for some time. Equipment footprint has been getting smaller for years. Functions that used to be handled by huge dedicated machines are now accomplished by modular cards. Specialized servers, switches, routers, and other network devices have been combined into multi-service boxes. Now with the advent of virtualization and the cloud, the footprint is getting even smaller. But with higher convergence comes a significant increase in complexity. And when complexity increases, availability usually suffers.

Website Down? Understanding Why

“The website is down again!” That can be pretty frustrating. In the heat of the moment, most of us don’t really care why it is down -- we just want back online. But the curious user may want to know more. What could make a web server unreachable? Why do they go down in the first place? To understand more, we should start with some basics.

Making a Case for Cloud and its Disruptive Benefits

Once again, society is on the cusp of witnessing another disruptive influence that has the ability to change the course of the business world. Thankfully, the phenomenon known as “cloud” (which includes computing, infrastructure-as-a-service, software-as-a-service and much more) has few doubting its abilities to disrupt the way we conduct business today.

The Essence of Uptime

Uptime is a key performance indicator (KPI). Some would say it is the key performance indicator, the sine qua non, of productive computing. If you can’t keep your system operational, you have nothing. None of the many functionalities – the bells and whistles – matter one whit if your customers can’t access your site or service. The expectation in the industry is for near 100% uptime.

EPO: Emergency Power Off or Extremely Probable Outage?

Have you ever thought about the necessity of EPO buttons in data centers? If you think they are required by law, you are incorrect. Sadly, many believe they are, including data center designers, and they still result in outages even today. We think EPO should be an acronym for Extremely Probably Outage.

Cloud Service Level Agreement Expectations

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are essential in the IT business. IT managers should know what to expect from their service providers. You should fully understand any SLA before signing it – especially when it comes to uptime. Everyone who has been around IT support has heard of Service Level Agreements. As we consider what is expected regarding uptime in SLAs, it might be helpful to briefly have a look at what SLAs are and their purpose

Downtime is no Longer Acceptable

If you went to bestbuy.com and the site was unavailable, how long would it take for you to go to amazon.com or elsewhere to find what you wanted? On average, it’s less than 30 seconds; it used to be much longer, but our society has grown impatient. If you’re not available when customers are looking for you, they will move on.

What is The Cloud? A Technical Explanation

The Cloud – we hear that phrase thrown around a lot. It is obviously a special place because nearly every company wants to go there, probably because we hear how wonderful everything works in the cloud. Those who go there are promised a great deal of cost savings as well. No wonder everyone is talking about it.

Digital Realty / Telx Atlanta Power Outage

On July 12th a major power event occurred at the prominent carrier hotel at 56 Marietta Street responsible for network interconnections for a significant portion of the southeast including over 60 carriers and over 100 telecom providers. The incident occurred during planned power distribution upgrades and created quite a number of issues for both regional and national organizations

The Need for Increased Availability is Now

Our predictions for the last half of 2017: Ransomware will keep evolving, the rise of IoT will pave way for increased DDoS Attacks, IPv6 Traffic will continue to grow exponentially, Machine Learning and AI will be applied to enhance security, and the need for increased availability is now.

The True Costs of Downtime for IT

Downtime is a dirty word in the IT business. Unplanned outages are unacceptable and should not be tolerated. In a universe where customers expect services to be available 99.999% of the time, any time your IT service offering is down is costly to your business. And the true cost of downtime may be more than you realize.

Explosion in Downtown Los Angeles Disrupts Data Center Operations

On Thursday night August 20th, 2015, a blast occurred in the basement of 811 West Wilshire Blvd. in downtown Los Angeles taking out an on-site power station leaving 12 buildings in the area without utility power for much of Friday, as reported by ABC News and other sources. The outage significantly affected major network provider Level 3 Communications, LogMeIn, major data center providers Internap and Equinix and several other companies...

Load Balancing Droplets from Digital Ocean

We recently helped a customer who had dozens of virtual machines (called Droplets) from Digital Ocean spanning multiple countries. Digital Ocean doesn’t have a load balancer, but even if they did, he was looking for a way to load balance traffic in each of 3 geographically diverse regions all without having to use DNS. He was using round-robin DNS to distribute the load among the group of servers, but it wasn’t working anywhere near the way he wanted it to, often distributing load unevenly.

Reroute or redirect IP traffic from one data center to another for disaster recovery

Many organizations have a business continuity or disaster recovery plan and have even implemented multi-data center redundancy with servers and other critical infrastructure at a separate location to that of their primary site. But the challenge every organization faces is how to easily and seamlessly redirect traffic from one site to another when disaster strikes.

Enable IPv6 with Cloud Load Balancing

As the global pool of IPv4 space continues to diminish every day, organizations are looking to deploy IPv6 at an ever increasing pace. But sometimes it's just plain difficult, especially when it requires a complete overhaul of your local network. Some organizations can implement dual-stack just fine, but for other organizations who host websites or applications at third party providers such as AWS EC2 and the like, IPv6 may not an option just yet.

Significant Growth Predicted for Hybrid Cloud

In a recent Computer World article, Technology Business Research shared their prediction for cloud growth in 2015. 33% growth rate for private cloud, 25% growth rate for public cloud and a whopping 50% growth rate for hybrid cloud all when compared to 2014 data.

Significant Cloud Outages of 2014

There is no question that the cloud is imperfect. Whether your business uses public, private or a hybrid cloud, outages happen all the time and are a part of life. At Total Uptime, we know this fact quite well, and that’s the primary reason we created our Cloud Networking solutions. Here are some of the biggest cloud outages of 2014 that disrupted service for millions around the world.

Internet Outages Today?

If you heard or felt Internet outages today, it wasn’t just you. It seems many end-users were filing complaints on downdetector.com for a vast number of unrelated ISPs. From our global vantage point, we could see that the Internet of things was acting strange.

Our Cloud is Different Than Yours

A day doesn’t go by where we are yet again annoyed with how flippant organizations are in using the word “cloud” for what appears to be a marketing hype. Take Western Digital and their My Cloud product for which I have seen many TV commercials as of late. It is simply a personal cloud storage device. What’s really “cloud” about it? Other than the fact that you can access it remotely, nothing! It gives honest, legitimate cloud providers like Total Uptime a bad rap.

Downtime costs $7900 per minute, on average

The cost of datacenter downtime has increased more than 40% for many companies over the last 3 years, according to a recent study by Ponemon Institute, sponsored by Emerson Network Power. The report analyzes 67 datacenters...

What Should and Should Not be called Cloud?

We read a great article last month on wired.com called Top 5 Things The Cloud Is Not. It’s rare we see an article like this that helps define what should and should not be called ‘Cloud’, so when we do see something, we like to call attention to it.

Account Management – A Quick Start Video

Watch this video to understand the functionality found in the Account section of the Total Uptime cloud management portal. Here you'll learn how to modify company information, add/edit and delete users, create roles & security groupings, alert lists and much more.

What is IP Anycast, and How Does it Work in the Cloud?

One of the most important aspects of the Total Uptime Cloud Platform is the underlying IP Anycast architecture. Without it, we would not be able to deliver a 100% uptime SLA and the level of performance our customer’s demand. In this article, we’ll explain what IP Anycast is (just called “Anycast”) and how we use it to deliver performance, reliability and uptime to our customers.

North American companies give cloud the most business

IT market research firm Gartner says interest in data center services is high around the world, but the market structure, dynamics and maturity are quite varied. In North America, hosting (42 percent) and cloud IaaS have achieved the highest level of client adoption, while the markets in the rest of the world are dominated by data center outsourcing (80 percent).

Security… Getting to the Bottom of “Cloudphobia”

Cloud solutions have gotten a bad rap. They have incredible potential to minimize a business’s IT infrastructure, scale to meet rapid demand, support mobile workers, and cut costs, but they have also gained the reputation of being a risky investment. Many people are just not ready to trust a third party to secure their confidential data.

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About Total Uptime Technologies

Total Uptime® Technologies, LLC is a privately held provider of Cloud solutions designed to help organizations achieve high availability in a demanding online world. Our multi-datacenter, multi-country Cloud platform easily delivers on our uptime promise because it has been engineered from the ground up to be fast, flexible and resilient.

While other organizations were busy renaming their legacy solutions as “Cloud” and dressing them up to take advantage of the latest hype, Total Uptime Technologies was engineering a true Cloud Platform that was multi-datacenter at its core. In our mind, Cloud meant resilient, and resilient meant that we had to design an application that could span infrastructure at different datacenters in different geographies – continents apart. Only then would we be content with calling it “Cloud”.